The Jungles of Emerald
by Vest and Bow Tie
Summary: "Buck's jog took maybe two minutes, which made what he found all the more frightening..." Emerald, a jewel of the outer colonies, covered in luscious jungle. Somewhere in the jungle is an insurrectionist stronghold. But the Insurrectionists aren't the only enemies hiding in the jungle...


Samuel Chance's heart rate tripled as he heard the sirens. Whatever the mood had been in the loading bay, it snapped into professional and serious. Samuel hated orbital insertions. He always had. Wondering why he volunteered for the ODSTs he 'danced to the music' readying his equipment and his 'pod' for the drop. A light blinked on Samuel's HUD, indicating that Alex, the team's captain, wanted to open a private channel. Samuel pressed the button on his helmet to complete the link and carried on preparing. Alex's concerned voice filled Samuel's ears.

"Sparks, you okay?"

Alex was good like that. He could read every member of the team like a book. Samuel kept his fear of drops to himself, but it wasn't long after he joined the team that Alex noticed Samuel didn't like them. Ever since then, he'd done his best to help Samuel, and without letting the rest of the team know. Samuel replied to Alex's inquiry easily enough, but he was still apprehensive about the drop. Something about being encased in a metal bullet and then shot at the surface of a planet that he didn't like.

Shoving his silenced sub-machine gun into the space reserved for it, he sat in the always uncomfortable seat, squashed between screens and spare magazines. The screens fizzled into life as the pod's hatch swung shut. The hatch connected with a _snap_ and then hissed as the pod was pressurised. Samuel could no longer hear the wail of the sirens, the flashing red lights pulsing silently. Samuel became aware of his breathing – deeper and quicker than usual, thanks to adrenalin. It was shockingly loud n the silence, and Samuel tried to calm it. Suddenly the red lights in the loading bay stopped pulsing and stayed lit, bathing the bay in an eerie bloody glow. Samuel's heart skipped a beat; he knew what came next.

A loud clank burst from the bottom of the pod, which shuddered. A series of other mechanical clanks and whines sounded overhead as the pod was lowered and rotated. The loading bay slid slowly out of Samuel's viewport, to be replaced by inky blackness, spotted with bright white points. Samuel felt suddenly weightless, this feeling accompanied by a final, massive _clank!_ The pod was now free from the _UNSC Sunrise_ the ship which had been carrying Samuel and his team. Samuel enjoyed the split second of peace, but it was rent in two by a furious _roar, _the pod's main thruster. After a few seconds, the roar cut off abruptly, the thruster spent.

The pod streaked through space and hit the atmosphere hard, generating a fierce glow on its leading face from the friction. Samuel gritted his teeth and gripped the handlebars of the pod with white knuckles. The pod shook violently, a leaf thrown about in a tornado. Samuel squeezed his eyes tightly shut and waited for it all to end. The ending though, he knew, was the worst part.

As terrifying as the 'descent phase' of a drop is, the 'impact phase' is shockingly sudden. The airbrakes burst from the back of the pod, violently slowing the craft. A grunt was torn from Samuel by the force of the deceleration. Before Samuel had time to recover, the landing thrusters of the pod fired, and the pod slowed again with another sudden jolt. Even with both these measures the pod still slammed into the surface of Emerald with terrifying force. Samuel was dazed for a full 60 seconds before he recovered. He slammed his hand into the three explosive bolts and the hatch burst from the pod, landing 15 feet away and opening the world to Samuel.

* * *

><p>Ashton Sampson opened his door manually, being significantly calmer than Samuel. The heat and humidity smacked him in the chest and he gasped audibly. Emerald was so named because of the luscious Jungles and rainforests blanketing its surface. From space, it resembled the jewel after which it was named, glimmering green. Ashton stepped out of his pod and gasped again at what he saw around him. For 360 degrees, visibility was highly limited, only a few dozen meters in any direction. Copses of dense bamboo and other short trees sprouted from the ground every few meters.<p>

Ashton's HUD flashed, indicating he had a new waypoint about a kilometre away. That would be Alex's pod. Orbital insertion was an inexact science, with teams often spreading over an area of several kilometres. Ashton was lucky to be as close as he was. Ashton turned back to his pod and checked over his gear. His massive combat knife still sheathed and strapped to his chest, his M6C SOCOM, the silenced pistol given to spec-ops troopers like the ODSTs, adhered magnetically to his hip. He reached into the pod and wrenched his shotgun free from its place in the pod.

He turned in the direction of the waypoint and started to walk, keying his intercom. All he received was a wash of static. He must be out of range of the other members of the team. Each ODST carried a short range secure radio as part of their standard equipment. Emerald, while discovered long enough ago, had not been colonised for the simple reason that the jungle covered every square centimetre of land. Thus there was no local secure network for the ODSTs to communicate via. The _UNSC Sunrise_ was projecting a 'radio cloud' over a massive area, certainly a wide enough range to contact the other members of the team. However, the radio cloud was insecure and it was possible that the insurrectionists could be listening to any transmission made over the cloud. Ashton looked around him and sighed. He slid his shotgun onto the magnetic plate on his back and started to jog toward the beacon.

* * *

><p>Cody Matthews' skin crawled. His pod had smashed into the middle of a field of some kind of tall reed. Apart from the small area cleared by his pod's impact, Cody could not see for more than a foot in front of him. The reeds were just taller than Cody, a fair effort given his 6 foot stature. They were a sickly yellow colour, dying in the heat and densely packed. Sighing, Cody slung his useless sniper rifle over his shoulder and set off toward Alex's beacon a few hundred meters away.<p>

* * *

><p>Elijah Severance slipped off his helmet the moment he was free from his pod. He had landed in dense jungle, with all kinds of trees interwoven with one another. Despite the shade, the density of the jungle made it disgustingly humid. Taking a few breaths, Elijah was surprised by memories of his youth surfacing, brought back by the heat. Elijah had grown up in southern Africa. Mentally shaking himself, he forced his way through the thick undergrowth to the back of his pod. This was no easy task as Elijah's call-sign of 'Bear' stemmed from his massive, bulky frame. Vines and creepers clung to his armour and uniform, holding him back. Tearing through these, he finally forced his way to the back of the pod. When he did, he grinned widely. His rocket launcher was fixed to the pod, and had survived the drop. Elijah's smile dropped a little as he looked around him. The undergrowth was no less dense for as far as he could see. Lugging the rocket launcher would not be fun.<p> 


End file.
